(This entry was one of our two winners! We will be reaching out to Campbell in a bit to give them their prize.)
Review
The Secret of Mossbrook by Campbell is a combatless adventure game. The story follows a boy who comes to a remote forest town in hopes of becoming a wizard, and he is soon given a set of tasks that should earn him the title. Players will spend the entirety of the game in and around this town, interacting with the villagers and unearthing the town’s history.
Most of the game will have you checking the interiors of Mossbrook’s buildings, wandering the outskirts of the town to find solutions to puzzles, and figuring out what you need to interact with in what order to accomplish Finley’s objectives. This kind of adventure gamey play later gives way to a special minigame coded (as far as I can tell) entirely through eventing. I won’t spoil what this is, but suffice to say Campbell has endeavored to inject some variety into the kinds of puzzles you’ll solve, and the way the minigame builds on itself as you get closer to the end is quite satisfying. I found myself a little weary of it by the end, but some of this is just me being terrible at logic puzzles and taking longer than most might with these.
If I could offer one suggestion here, it would be to vary the type of thing the player does in the game’s final act. The rapid-fire minigame puzzles were packed maybe a little too close together for my tastes to the point of making the final act feel rather repetitive. It also didn’t help that, at least as far as I could tell, the map provided to help solve the final puzzle seemed to be incorrect. It took me longer than I care to admit to solve that puzzle, and I was only able to do it by disregarding the in-game hint map altogether, which feels a little bad. That said, these pathing puzzles did at least play an important thematic purpose I’ll talk a bit more about later.
While most of this game’s non-minigame puzzle solving is about clicking on things in a particular order, Campbell has done a fantastic job of making it rewarding to do that. Finley’s comments on the objects and characters he encounters are always entertaining to read, and usually have a joke or pun involved. The game takes a shotgun approach to its humor — just about anything you do has a comedic element to it, and I’m sure at least a few of the game’s jokes will have you laugh out loud. Even when the thing you’re messing with turns out to be a red herring, you’ll usually be happy to have clicked on it. The environments themselves likewise follow a discernible logic — the buildings, the paths between them and even the more fantastic areas feel naturalistically and believably designed within the limits of using only RTP. Hats off to Campbell for giving every last thing I could find just that little extra bit of attention that a game like this thrives on.
While the game is full of humor, I wouldn’t call its story a farce. Talking to the residents of Mossbrook and unraveling the story of the town is a lot more rewarding than I expected. I found that pretty much every character in this game had something “real” about them, even when our interactions were brief. And the more time I spent with the game, the more I noticed that even one-off jokes served a greater purpose in developing the town and Finley himself. There are a lot of technically impressive things about this game but the biggest one for me was the way it weaved its comedy together with genuinely thoughtful character writing that suggests the author really cares about their characters and world. I never felt like something was in the game to exist as a joke and literally nothing else, as even Finley’s little comments on people’s personal belongings tended to say something about him.
What really made this entry a gem was its cohesiveness. Most of the dialogue and interactivity in the game is doing more than one thing, whether it’s serving as comedic relief, developing the town of Mossbrook as a setting, or helping you understand what kind of person Finley is. I really cannot stress enough how thorough the author is about this: I was seeing things that made me go “oh I get why this character did this” all the way to the final minutes. Even the minigames that stand in for magic spells feel like an abstraction for what the spell is trying to accomplish rather than just a non sequitur. The repair spell has you “get into the nooks and crannies” of the map it puts you on, and the familiar spell has you meeting your familiar “halfway.” The only spell that didn’t feel quite so thematically on point was the fire spell, though I suppose you could say it had you making flame-like spiral motions with your movement. Even the fire spell had an amazing moment in the wizard’s house though, where it feels like you’re in direct conflict with another wizard. This is why I find it easy to forgive the game’s final act being a bit too heavy on this minigame: it did feel like Finley had become fully immersed in spellcraft and was now solving only supernatural problems. By having these puzzles be the game’s “language” for magic, the finale felt like a proper escalation of the game’s scenario. Finley went from putting a bucket on his head as a quest solution to going toe to toe with the spell locks of a powerful wizard.
Overall, this is a solid adventure game that does a lot with a little. It restricts its scope but gets as much as it can out of a few well-chosen elements. While I’ll try to dissect Mossbrook’s adventure game elements a bit more in-depth below, I would recommend stopping here and playing the game for yourself. It’s a real treat, and exactly the kind of entry that makes me excited about game jams.
Special Topic: Adventure Gaming in RPG Maker
I realized what kind of game this was when I noticed I could not access the menu. By foregoing things like stats, a traditional inventory, and (I assumed) combat, I was interested to see what kinds of interaction the game would offer in place of these elements. Rather than combat, all of Mossbrook’s interaction is about paying attention to the environment and interacting with things in the right order to solve environmental puzzles, with the spellcasting minigame used to sprinkle a little variety into this.
Theoretically most of the non-minigame puzzles could be solved by brute-force-clicking on every game object over and over, but there are enough interactable elements that thinking about the logical connections between characters, items, and the world to figure out what needs to be clicked on will save you a lot of time. Convincing the player to actually sync with the game’s logic rather than simply mashing Z on everything is important work for an adventure game to do, and I think Mossbrook manages this.
Direly important to accomplishing this, in my opinion, is a thing Ron Gilbert once said about “backwards puzzles”: you generally want the problem to be found before its solution. One of the reasons I think this is important is because if a player sees a problem in the game and then goes searching for “leads” on how to solve it, they’re engaging with the game’s scenario and trying to follow its logic. If the player instead is looking for things to click on assuming they’ll be important later, however, they aren’t really engaging with the scenario but the genre — in other words they’re just looking for keys with the assumption that locks will come. This is a particularly joyless outcome that I think Mossbrook deftly avoids by making the player aware of their immediate goals very quickly.
Roughly, the game’s flow goes something like this:
Meet Eugene and Martha, be assigned your 4 tasks -> Identify Mervin and prove he’s a wizard -> Enter the cave and gain spellcasting -> Finish the remaining three tasks -> open the way to the final challenge.
It says a lot of good things that much of the interaction in this game lies outside of the structure above. Since there are a few optional objectives and one of the tasks has three possible solutions, the structure feels a bit more open ended and not simply like a knot to unravel. The player can be progressing toward the three tasks pretty much immediately, and the order has a lot of leeway to it. For example, in my game I ended up in the cave before I found Mervin, then went to find the bucket, repair the lookout, and get a familiar. I also forgot about the chicken entirely until later, as I went back to solve the fortune teller situation assuming she was important to one of the other tasks. I thus very rarely ever felt like I was searching for the “right” way forward, and you should be proud of accomplishing this, as many commercial adventure games run face first into this problem.
This leads me to one of the things that impressed me most about the game’s overarching design: you used your “red herrings” quite well. It’s important for an adventure game like this to have more things a player could be interacting with than they need to for their current puzzle, forcing them to guess at what is relevant to the particular problem they're working on. This, like avoiding backwards puzzles, is how adventure games encourage a player to engage with the world logic before resorting to brute force.
There are three big things in the game that I think are really good red herrings: the fortune teller, the guy whose window was broken, and the mailman. They’re not actually necessary to solving most of the game’s puzzles, but they tie into the game’s overarching theme of a wizard practicing magic to help others and not simply to serve their own desires. Better still, they actually play into how you get the good ending, serving multiple purposes. This was brilliant!
Overall this game had a strong showing in puzzle design even with its very limited mechanics, and I look forward to seeing what Campbell might do later with fewer limitations.